


If the path be beautiful (Let us not ask where it leads)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Parallels, Pining, Pre-Relationship, the steve/danny is all implied but features heavily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:40:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21527698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: She rolls her head along the headrest of the car to look at him. He’s hitting the gas pedal the exact right amount again, so naturally he’s paying attention to the road, but he’s relaxed. She wonders if Danny ever takes a moment to just look at Steve like this. “Would you put your finger in my chest if I got shot?”“Of course,” he says, kidding, but also like he’s dead serious.Or: Tani and Junior, in a car, discussing Steve and Danny and romantic potential.
Relationships: Junior Reigns & Tani Rey, Junior Reigns/Tani Rey, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 20
Kudos: 197





	If the path be beautiful (Let us not ask where it leads)

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve wanted to write Tani and Junior fic since FOREVER and I have at least three separate mostly done fics that center around them, but none of them ever got _actually_ done, so they remained unpublished. Now here is one! This is fairly canon compliant and set pre-9.23 (the wedding date), but post-9.03 (the heat wave), probably somewhere in the first half of season 9, I think.
> 
> So yes. This is A) a pre-relationship Tani/Junior fic, because there isn’t enough fic about them out there imho, and B) a fic that milks the parallels with Steve/Danny for all that it’s worth, because they’re handing those to us on a silver platter and I know some people are irked by it and I fully, deeply understand why, but I also can’t help but really, really love the potential of it for fandom. 
> 
> The title is a quote from French writer Anatole France.

They’re on their way to a witness and Junior is driving. That’s still faintly uncomfortable – it’s _Tani’s car_ , okay, and she’s a little protective over it after it got stolen that one time – but he won best out of three at rock paper scissors fair and square this morning, so there is nothing to do but honorably concede defeat. Tani sits back and tries to enjoy being driven around.

That works for all of thirty seconds. Then she wants a distraction, so she grabs at the first thing that comes into her mind. “Why do we keep getting compared to Steve and Danny?” 

After she says it, she knows it was probably influenced by the fact that the other fixed partnership in Five-0 naturally lurks very close under the surface in any who-drives-the-car argument. Interesting, how a mind works, and how she didn’t actually manage to change the topic much at all.

Junior doesn’t even glance in her direction, instead keeping his eyes on the road, driving with perfect form and exactly the speed limit. His rigid adherence to not just the basics of the law but also every syllable of a driver’s manual would seem to imply that he’s more worried about potentially crashing her car than she is, but she knows him well enough to know this is just who he is. “Well, I’m a SEAL,” he says, in response to her question. “And you’re, uh-”

“Yes? I’m what?”

He randomly brakes to let an old man with a cane cross the road. They both watch him crawl past their windshield at a snail’s pace. “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes you have a short temper.”

She breathes in and out and pushes her anger to the side. “I have no idea what you mean,” she says, trying for completely detached and not hitting the mark in the slightest, but she definitely isn’t yelling, at least. She’s doing miles better than Danny would have. Short temper who?

Junior has the audacity to laugh at her anyway. “Yes, you do. And that Danny impression you did, remember, during the heatwave? That was spot-on, too.”

She rolls her head along the headrest of the car to look at him. He’s hitting the gas pedal the exact right amount again, so naturally he’s paying attention to the road, but he’s relaxed. She wonders if Danny ever takes a moment to just look at Steve like this. “Would you put your finger in my chest if I got shot?” 

“Of course,” he says, kidding, but also like he’s dead serious. He doesn’t hesitate, but maybe that’s just a SEAL thing. “Would you give me half of your liver?”

“I don’t even know if I could, but sure. Would you want to run a hopeless restaurant with me?”

“Are you kidding me? Yeah. Would you let me raise your kids with you?”

“I think you’d make a great dad some day.” She didn’t really mean to say that, and in her moment of _oh shit_ she forgets to shoot back another question, but she’s not taking the words back. It could have been a lot worse.

He gets this small, pleased smile that chips away further at her lack of regret. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says, and lets it hang between them for a while.

Junior is still smiling a bit when he says, “Did you know that they once went on a double date for Valentine’s?”

“Really? With who?”

“Their girlfriends. It was a whole weekend.”

She laughs, loud and surprised. “You’re shitting me.”

“No, it’s true. The women set it up, but I don’t think they got to enjoy it much. There was something about Danny thinking some kid stole his sunglasses and then Steve chased after him most of the time, so they barely even saw their girlfriends. The story got brought up during dinner one day when Danny was over with Grace and she’d forgotten her sunglasses at Danny’s place.” 

“Wow,” Tani says, because truly, _wow_. “If their girlfriends really did that, they seriously underestimated how horribly codependent those two are when combined.”

“I know. They had adjoining rooms, too.”

Tani’s thoughts go down a path she knows they shouldn’t. “Do you think they could hear each other through the wall at night when they were with their girlfriends? You know, like-”

“Wow!” Junior yells. It’s so rare that he raises his voice that she almost laughs at him.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

He shoots her a haunted look. He turns back to the road quickly, but he’s still wide-eyed. “Yeah, I do, and I would really like to keep pretending I don’t. Please stop right there. I have to live with McGarrett.”

“Okay,” she agrees, because really, she’s a little relieved he didn’t let her finish that question. Now that she’s had a second to think about it, she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to dwell on it, either. But there’s a different, related subject to be brought up, here, one that she’s been wondering about ever since she started at Five-0. “They’re not seeing either of those girlfriends now though, right?”

“I don’t think so, no. Steve definitely isn’t.”

“Right, and you live with him. You have insider knowledge.” She keeps a close eye on his face, just in case he deflects again and she might have to search for a clue in some minute nose twitch before he tries to cover it up. “Do you think they’re, you know? Together? More than just platonically?”

He doesn’t have a weird reaction, and she’s half disappointed, half excited that he’s taking this seriously. “I don’t know. At first I thought maybe, but then it turned out that they were both dating women. Now that’s over, but I live with Steve and he’s slept alone in his own bed every day since the break-up with Lynn that I know of, so it seems unlikely.”

There’s something sad about hearing it like that. Not that Tani has been sharing her own bed with anyone lately, but it’s easier and more fun to pity Steve than herself. “Well,” she says, thinking about the last time she even slept in the same room with anyone. “They definitely weren’t cuddling up in quarantine.”

“Right. But it was quarantine. Not exactly the most romantic spot, especially with spectators twenty-four hours a day.”

“True.” She would have been seriously shocked if they had suddenly gone all lovey-dovey. At this point, after working with them for over a year, she wouldn’t bat an eye if someone told her they’d been married in secret all this time, but she would be very weirded out and a little worried if they started getting all mushy in public, with none of the bicker-fighting that they have down to an art from. “Maybe Danny sneaks in through the window after you and Eddie are asleep.”

Junior nods like that’s a serious possibility. One of Tani’s favorite things about him is how often their humor is on the same wavelength. It’s like surfing on a day that the conditions are so perfect it feels like the ocean is consciously working with you on everything you try to do. “Can’t entirely rule it out,” Junior says, even though they probably can, because there’s no way Danny would be able to consistently out-sneak Junior’s seally senses.

Tani loves perfect waves. She also loves doing something unexpected, and in that regard Junior is a lot easier to trick than the ocean. “Maybe they do it in the bathroom at work,” she offers, innocently. 

It’s throwing a stone, and the splash it makes is satisfying. Junior’s face conveys the despair of a man who won’t be able to take a leak in peace at work for the next few weeks without being reminded of this conversation. “Tani!”

She laughs, because that response is even better than she’d hoped for. “I’m sorry. I’m messing with you.”

“Maybe there’s nothing going on at all,” he says, like he’s trying to convince himself unicorns might be real.

“Maybe they’re deeply in love but neither of them has ever made the first move,” Tani counters.

“Maybe Steve’s been pining for nine years and Danny just never noticed.”

Tani scoffs at the idea. “He’d have to be pretty blind not to see that. It’s very obvious.”

For the first time, Junior doesn’t answer immediately, so Tani looks at him, and is surprised to find him already looking at her out of the corner of his eyes. He turns back to the road quickly. “Yeah,” he says, vaguely.

She keeps watching him for a moment, baffled, until he reaches over to switch the radio on. Her staring interrupted, she turns to her passenger window. She looks the other way, and wonders, in the back of her mind, how many times Danny has done that.

**Author's Note:**

> And then, you know, Danny invites Steve to a wedding as friends and Steve picks Danny up and they have a lot of fun dancing together and some random woman tells Danny that they make a cute couple and asks if Steve is single when Danny says that oh no, no, they’re not a couple, they’re just friends, but then Danny just stares at Steve with a kind of stricken, heartbroken look instead of answering her question and the woman wishes him good luck and Danny goes back onto the dancefloor and Steve and Danny do a Meaningful Slow Dance, and oh, what a coincidence, the exact same thing happens to Tani and Junior but it happens to be filmed! Isn’t it funny how life works out?
> 
> Anyhow, thank you for reading!! You are cool and comments are, too. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
